More Orwell and Mosley

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I looked at Sir Oswald Mosley’s life in a two part article. In my previous article I looked at Orwell’s report of a March 1936 Mosley meeting in Barnsley. Here I look at Orwell’s later references to him before and during the Second World War.

On the Road to Wigan Pier. In this 1937 book Orwell wrote that:

When I think of Fascism in England I am not necessarily thinking of Mosley and his pimpled followers. English fascism when it arrives is likely to be of a sedate and subtle kind (presumably at any rate at first it won’t be called fascism), and it is doubtful whether a Gilbert and Sullivan heavy dragoon of Mosley’s stamp would ever be much more than a joke to the majority of English people; though even Mosley will bear watching for experience shows (vide the careers of Hitler, Napoleon III) that to a political climber it is sometimes an advantage not to be taken too seriously at the beginning of his career.

Facing Unpleasant Facts. On 27 November 1937 Time and Tide printed Orwell’s review of a book by Walter (Wal) Hannington the communist leader of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement. George Orwell praised the book but disagreed with Hannington over one point. They agreed that mass unemployment could lead to fascism; but Orwell wrote that Hannington is too ready to think of fascism in terms of Hitler and Mosley. English fascism, if it ever comes, is likely to be a lot subtler than that: Sir Oswald is in fact merely a red herring in a black shirt.

Other people realised that Mosley was dangerous as Orwell himself had earlier pointed out. The people who realised this included the East Enders who defeated the British Union of Fascists (the BUF) at Cable Street.

Orwell’s next mentioned Mosley in a 5 March 1939 letter to Herbert Read, writing that Britain was due for a war within two years, or for a long period of war preparation, or a sham war preparation designed to excuse wage cuts, suppression of free speech, colonial repression etc. Provided the real or alleged objective was war with Germany most of the official left, i.e. the Labour and Communist Parties, would support it. The Communists Party was still in its Popular Front period. The revolt against fascist methods would have to be against ostensible left wingers as well as the establishment. The rebels would be in two camps: dissident leftists like Orwell; and the idealistic Hitler fascists in England more or less represented by Mosley.

Orwell wrote that Mosley might not have the sense and guts to oppose a war with Germany once it had started, for he might decide to cash in on the patriotism business.  Even if Mosley went patriotic, however, someone else would take his place. Therefore dissident leftists should prepare to oppose crypto fascism to stop full blown fascists utilizing popular discontents.

On 6 August 1939 Orwell noted in his diary that twenty five thousand people were said to have attended a Mosley Earl’s Court meeting; and that Mosley was said to have lost some of his East End working class support, but gained following amongst small businessmen. Small businessmen worried by Jewish competition were the hard core of Hitler’s early followers.

On 12 August 1939 Orwell diarised that the refugee problem was becoming serious in the East End; but that Mosley said to have not greatly increased his following however. On 31 August 1939 Orwell diarised that: It appears from reliable private information that Sir O. Mosley is a masochist of the extreme type in his sexual life.

A Patriot After All. On 28 July 1940 Orwell diarised that a little man whose name he forgot had told him that William Joyce, the Lord Haw Haw of German radio broadcasts, hated Mosley; and had led an openly Nazi splinter group that had broken away from Mosley’s BUF. George Orwell wrote that Hitler using Joyce as a broadcaster rather than a Mosley follower suggested that Hitler did not want there to be a strong English Fascist Party.

William Joyce, an Irishman, was probably readier to be Hitler’s chief English language Nazi propaganda broadcaster than English Mosleyites would. Some English fascists did make Nazi propaganda broadcasts but in a subordinate role. William Joyce was hanged for treason after the war but his English fascist colleagues got prison terms.

The 24 August 1940 Time and Tide printed Orwell’s review of Winifred Holtby’s play Take Back Take Back Your Freedom. She had died in 1935 aged thirty seven and it was published posthumously. It portrays the career and private life of a middle class man who builds up a Fascist Party; wins a general election; becomes a dictator; finds himself the prisoner of the power he worships; shoots his best friend for advocating a policy which would reduce the dictator’s open power; and then implements it himself. Finally the dictator’s own horrified, progressive mother shoots him dead.

In the January 1941 Left News, Gollancz’s Left Book Club Journal, Orwell noted that the Local Defence Volunteers which became the Home Guard got a quarter of a million recruits on its first day and a million more in a few weeks. In contrast the combined membership of the Communists, the Independent Labour Party, Mosley’s BUF and the Peace Pledge Union was less than a hundred and fifty thousand.

On 3 January 1941 in his London Letter, printed in the March-April 1941 American journal Partisan Review, Orwell noted that the only open defeatists were the Communists, Mosley’s followers and the pacifists. As Orwell said:

Mosley’s black-shirts have ceased to exist as a legal organisation, but they probably deserve to be taken more seriously than the communists if only because the tone of their propaganda is more acceptable to soldiers, sailors and airmen.

The fascists blamed the war and the bombing on the Jews. The worst East End bombing had stirred up some anti-Semitism, but this had been faint. George Orwell noted that there was some overlapping membership between the BUF and the pacifists. He argued that such people might serve as a cover if a Petain-style government ousted Churchill; and repeated that William Joyce was a personal enemy of Mosley.

Secker and Warburg published Orwell’s book The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius in February 1941. He argued that the idea of a Hitler victory appealed to certain sections of the population including Mosley’s followers; and that Mosley’s Blackshirts though now lying very low are a more serious danger, because of the footing they probably possess in the armed forces. Still even in its palmiest days Mosley’s following can hardly have numbered 50,000.

Further on Orwell wrote that:

One would have had to look a long time to find a man more barren of ideas than Sir Oswald Mosley. He was as hollow as a jug. Even the elementary fact that Fascism must not offend national sentiment had escaped him. His entire movement was imitated slavishly from abroad, the uniform and the party programme from Italy, and the salute from Germany, with the Jew baiting tacked on as an after-thought, Mosley having actually started his movement with Jews among his most prominent followers. A man of the stamp of (Horatio) Bottomley or Lloyd George could probably have brought a real British Fascist movement into existence. But such leaders only appear when the psychological need for them exists.

The July-August 1941 Partisan Review published Orwell’s 15 April 1941 London Letter. In it Mosley is incidentally mentioned.

Keeping Our Little Corner Clean. George Orwell next mentioned Mosley on 21 September 1942 when he diarised that the writer Osbert Sitwell was at one time connected with Mosley’s movement.

Two Wasted Years. The 7 November 1943 Observer published Orwell’s review of Douglas Lancelot Reed’s 1943 book Lest We Regret. George Orwell wrote that much of Reed’s arguments about the evils of private property in land and the monstrous crime committed against the English people by the enclosure of the commons, would be impressive if it did not remind one all the time of the articles that used to appear in Mosley’s “British Union”; and also if it were accompanied by any comprehensive economic programme, or even any intelligible agricultural policy.

Hitler had used the grievances of German peasants, independent craftsmen and small shopkeepers as a tool to gain power. Mosley had tried to do the same. For instance the abolition of tithes in England in 1936 by the Conservative government, was partly due to the BUF supporting farmers who objected to paying tithes to the Church of England. However this had not translated into votes.

I have tried to tell the truth. On 17 December 1943 Orwell noted in his As I Please column in Tribune,  that: The people who demonstrated most loudly against Mosley’s release, were the leaders of the defunct People’s Convention which at the time that Mosley was interned, was running a “Stop the War” campaign barely distinguishable from Mosley’s own.

Dennis Nowell Pritt KC, a former People’s Convention leader, wrote a letter to Tribune which it published on 31 December 1943. He denied that the People’s Convention was ever defeatist and said it was not set up until July 1940 two months after Mosley was interned. George Orwell replied said that although the People’s Convention was not set up until July 1940 those behind it had been defeatist since the war started. Its defeatist activities were exposed by Gollancz’s March 1941 Left Book Club anthology The Betrayal of the Left.

The spring 1944 Partisan Review printed Orwell’s 15 January 1944 London Letter. Orwell wrote of the current situation:

Fed-upness and disbelief in sunshine promises are general, and show themselves in sudden outbursts of indignation like the row that occurred over Mosley’s release from internment. On the face of it this was a bad symptom amounting as it did, to a popular protest against habeas corpus (incidentally there was far more clamour over Mosley’s release than there had been in favour of locking him up in the beginning) and it is also true that most of the public demonstrations were stage managed by communists anxious to live down their own anti-war activities.

Orwell noted that King Edward VIII’s abdication had somewhat discredited the monarchy and had cut across political lines. Edward VIII’s strongest supporters were Churchill, Mosley and H. G. Wells.

On 28 January 1944 in As I Please Orwell discussed the American poet and fascist sympathiser Ezra Loomis Pound; and wrote that: By the mid 1930’s Pound was singing the praises of the boss (Mussolini) in a number of English papers including Mosley’s quarterly British Union ((to which Vidkun Quisling was also a contributor).

On 19 May 1944 in As I Please Orwell noted that One very curious characteristic of Fascists – I mean amateur fascists I assume that the Gestapo are cleverer – is their failure to recognize that the parties of the left are distinct from one another and by no means aiming at the same thing. In the first issue of Mosley’s “British Union Quarterly” which I have by me (incidentally it contains an article by no less a person than Major Vidkun Quisling), I note that even Wyndham Lewis speaks of Stalin and Trotsky as though they were equivalent persons.

George Orwell’s pamphlet The English People was completed by 22 May 1944 and published in 1947. He noted the weakness of British doctrinaire parties and that: There are about half a dozen of these parties, but their combined membership, even if one counts the remnants of Mosley’s Black-shirts, would probably not amount to 150,000.

On 4 June 1944 the Observer printed Orwell’s article Survey of Civvy Street. He noted that certain events such as the release of Mosley had shaken public confidence; but the main problem was a lack of clear public planning for post war rebuilding.

On 27 October 1944 in As I Please Orwell noted how John Middleton Murry, in his 1944 book Adam and Eve, had argued that the protests over Mosley’s release were a worrying sign that totalitarian feeling was growing in Britain. George Orwell wrote that it was right to intern Mosley in 1940 and that if the Germans had invaded it would have been right to shoot Mosley. When it is a matter of national existence, no government can stand on the letter of the law.

By 1943 the threat of a serious German invasion had passed and Mosley was merely a ridiculous failed politician with varicose veins. Continuing to imprison him without trial was an infringement of every principle we are supposedly fighting for.

However the public protests against Mosley’s release were less due to totalitarian feeling, than to the belief that Mosley was released because he was upper class. One widely heard comment was that “They’ve only done it because he’s a rich man” Oswald and Diana Mosley were indeed very well connected.

I belong to the Left. The April 1945 Contemporary Jewish Review issue carried Orwell’s article about British anti-Semitism. He noted it was rife but that most educated people would deny being it and considered it to be unforgivable even if they admitted disliking Jews. People would go to remarkable lengths to demonstrate that they are not anti-Semitic.

For instance in 1943 a London synagogue held a well-attended intercession service for Polish Jews. Among those there were people who Orwell knew disliked Jews. For instance: the commander of my own platoon of Home Guards, who had been especially keen beforehand that we should make a “good show” at the intercession service, was an ex-member of Mosley’s Black-shirts.

In fact people may like, love, and even marry and have children by people from a different race or nation, and still dislike that race or nation. The final part of this article will look at Orwell’s references to Mosley after the Second World War ended; and conclude with some closing remarks.